Hopefully this isn’t indicative of the sale as a whole. Online Black Friday “deals” over the last few years have hardly been deals. Ooh, on top of everything, my local K-Mart is going out of business (FINALLY; it’s amazing they lasted as long as they did). If I check it out on Black Friday, I’d better remember to take my gun.

Still, I can’t imagine much money being sent to space for a while after said collapse. I dunno... Hey, what happens to Spain now that Catalonia has declared independence? Will the EU force them to recognize?

Sure, sure. And part of that, of course, comes from having your continent torn to shreds every time one of the world powers goes to war. “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”, sure, but I’d venture that the total number of conflicts in Europe could give them a run for their money. You’d think, then, that with the EU (and far more than that, NATO), things would change. “Finally they’ll stop beating each other up, which means they can collaborate on these things...”...

I sort of get a “Look, Daddy, I did it!” feel from the Europeans’ accomplishments here. Which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not the kick we need to get humanity into space to stay. JAXA (with NASA support) themselves already landed on asteroid Itokawa, so that’s both categories of small body landings taken care of now. Sure, in the same way that building an unmanned skiff, pointing it toward the New World, unfurling the sails, and watching it drift that-a-way...

You’d be surprised at the appeals to emotion/poverty/pity bandied about by supposedly adult members of government, even... No, most people agree with me: that the Internet should be free, unfettered, and unregulated. Reclassifying it will do the opposite. The problem is that “net neutrality” has, in the past, referred to BOTH SIDES of the argument. As a term, it is now meaningless. What is important is the content for which you stand, not the terms.